Posted on 03/14/2007 4:49:20 AM PDT by slowhand520
The Case for Competence What government%u2019s missing.
By Fred Thompson
Editor's note: Click here to listen to the original radio commentary.
Wasn’t it Casey Stengel, the old baseball manager, who said one day after the third dropped fly-ball in the outfield, “can’t anybody here play this game?” That’s sort of the way I feel when I watch certain parts of our government in action.
We’ve known for a long time that our intelligence capabilities weren’t cutting muster. It was certainly the case before 9/11, and it’s still true in Iraq and elsewhere. Now we have apparently decided that we really don’t know if North Korea has a uranium enrichment program to make bombs or not.
Whether it’s the Katrina response, the problems at Walter Reed Medical Center, bungled border security, or the IRS and FBI which can’t get their computer systems working, it seems like we’ve lost our ability to take care of some of the most basic duties of government.
Not that this problem is new. For decades, the U.S. Government Accountability Office has told us, time and time again, that we’ve lost control of the waste and fraud and mismanagement in many of our most important agencies. And it’s getting worse.
A big part of the problem is our outmoded civil-service system that makes it too hard to hire good employees and too hard to fire bad ones. The bureaucracy has become gargantuan, making accountability and reform very difficult.
Faced with this managerial swampland, the number of talented executives willing to come to Washington continues to dwindle. Those who do accept the challenges usually want to tackle big national goals in the few years they spend in public service instead of fighting their own agencies. So the bureaucracy just keeps rolling along.
Department heads should learn a lesson from Casey, who once said about his winning Yankees, “There is less wrong with this team than any team I have ever managed.”
What we need now are managers who understand that even building a government with “less wrong” about it would be a major public service and a truly worthwhile legacy. Of course, it would be nice if they got a little help from Congress and the White House.
— Fred Thompson is an actor and former United States senator from Tennessee.
This happens in the private sector too -- someone applies for a promotion, but the rules state that such a position requires an "open" application process. So, the boss and the employee work together to create a "job description" that matches exactly one person in the whole world: the employee.
A huge number of "open" positions in governments and corporations are really pro forma listings for these types of cases.
I'm sure a savvy oldtimer like Thompson knows it's "cut the mustard." The transcriptionist is probably the one who hasn't heard the phrase and got it wrong in the print version.
A friend of mine hired a guy a couple of weeks ago to work in his mechanic shop. Last week the guy missed two days. My friend asked him why:His answer was that he had a couple of side jobs to do and they paid more than the job my friend had for him. He suggested my friend give him more money and he wouldnt have to take off. My friend gave him a pink slip.
Now he can work all the side jobs he can get.
After what we've seen from the rostrum since January 2001, I have come to believe that acting is not only an acceptable preparation for the Presidency, it might well be one of the best preparations.
Imagine....a President that can articulate a rationale for a policy, who can string sentences together, who doesn't make you wince every time he opens his mouth...who doesn't sound, frankly, just exactly the way liberals describe him.
That is a President I would like and I think Thompson would be great in that regard.
Better than what? This is empty rhetoric and feel-good double-talk.
My thoughts exactly (see my tagline)
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